Tinsel Town: Finding a ghost’s voice

Hero Naga in Pisasu Tamil Movie Stills

What sort of voice would suit a ghost?

To find an answer to that, filmmaker Mysskin, whose paranormal thriller Pissasu is hitting the screens today, sent his assistant directors on a wild goose chase of sorts.

“I asked them to go to the most unusual of spots and record unique live sounds,” he said, in a telephonic interview. “They came back with all sorts of sounds, including recordings at a pig sty and the screeching noise a bottle dragged on the road would make. We eventually synthesised a lot of these sounds to create the voice of the ghost. I hope it creates the expected impact inside a theatre.”

The director’s last film at the box office,

Onayum Aatukuttiyum , gained more critical acclaim than box office success, where the film could not run enough to reap the benefits of the positive word-of-mouth publicity it got. The film, however, won him a fan in national award-winning director Bala, who has produced Pissasu .

Mysskin said human compassion was the central theme in all his movies. It wouldn’t be any different with Pissasu too, the director said.

“The want of a ghost has traditionally been portrayed as negative, and the general idea is to fear ghosts. But I think I have a different approach to the story with

Pissasu . This movie explores the concept of human compassion very differently.”